Jamie Dimon: Trump's Tax Cut, Deregulation Have 'Accelerated Growth'

JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said Monday that President Donald Trump's tax cuts, along with some of his other efforts, have helped out the U.S. economy.

"Presidents get a lot of credit [and] a lot of blame for things they didn't do, but the president has done things which accelerated growth," Dimon told CNBC."We needed competitive taxes. The way the American public should be thinking of it is: For 20 years, we've been increasingly uncompetitive, driving capital and brains overseas," he said.

The U.S. economy grew at its fastest pace in nearly four years in the second quarter as consumers boosted spending and farmers rushed shipments of soybeans to China to beat retaliatory trade tariffs before they took effect in early July.

Gross domestic product increased at a 4.1 percent annualized rate also as government spending picked up, the Commerce Department said in its snapshot of second-quarter GDP. While that was the strongest performance since the third quarter of 2014, it was not the best since the recession ended in mid-2009.

January-March quarter GDP growth was revised up to a 2.2 percent pace from the previously reported 2.0 percent rate to account for updated information and methodology improvements.

Compared to the second quarter of 2017, the economy grew 2.8 percent. Output expanded 3.1 percent in the first half of 2018, putting the economy on track to hit the Trump administration’s target of 3 percent annual growth. A measure of domestic demand surged at a 4.3 percent rate in the second quarter.

Dimon also said some of the regulatory rollbacks pushed by Trump are helping small businesses. "We've had less small business formation in America than in any other recovery," he said.

"This has accelerated the growth. It's been 20 percent over 10 years; it should've been 40. The reason it wasn't 40 is because of a lot of things that we did hurt ourselves."

However, Dimon fears that Trump's trade policies could be a headwind to the U.S. economic expansion.

"I think it could offset some of the benefits" of the tax overhaul and other measures.